08. VII. St. Paul and St. John
VII. St. Paul and St. John
(This section is nearly the same as Chapters XVII and XVIII of The First Christian Century, as the writer discovered only on August 17, 1913. Another example would have been chosen, if he had remembered that this was the case. The topic had to be noticed (see p. 15); and the manuscript, which lay ready to his hand, was, as he thought, more recent than that book.) The relation between Paul and John is important for the comprehension of the New Testament as a whole. What is adumbrated in Paul, is wrought out finally in John’s Gospel and his First Epistle to its absolute perfection. Paul inaugurates, and John completes, the New Testament.
Yet to us in the West it is sometimes necessary to read Paul in order to understand John: often Paul comes nearer to our way of thought than John. Always, however, each must be read in the light of the other. We are conscious of a definite evolution of the religious consciousness as we pass from Paul to John; but it is an evolution towards full comprehension of the original teaching of Jesus; and it is by no means the case that, as some scholars have maintained in recent times, the “Church’s consciousness” constructed for itself a new religious thought. From first to last both Paul and John were moving within the drift of Christ’s thought: they were both interpreting, according to their nature and experience, the true content of His teaching.
We cannot regard John’s Gospel as specially comprehensible to the Gentiles, though it was written in Asia for Asiatic Hellenes. It is deeply Palestinian in its cast of thought and expression; and the religious atmosphere in which it moves is non-Hellenic to a greater degree than the writings of Paul, which are more strongly tinged with Hellenism. Inasmuch as John wrote in Asia Minor, perhaps at Ephesus, a sort of prepossession has grown up that his Gospel was most easily understood by Greeks. Early quotations do not justify the belief that his Gospel was most popular or most frequently read by the early Gentile Christians, On the contrary, as Principal Iverach has pointed out, John is much less frequently quoted by the early Gentile Christian writers than the other Gospels.
I take here one slight example of what seems to me a wrong way of contemplating the writings of John and their relation to the older Christian books. This is an example which is more of manner and style than of thought, and yet one which is of considerable interest. It occurs in Dr. Moffatt’s Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament, where on p. 562 we find it stated “as a feature of the later age” that, in the Fourth Gospel, “the dialogues beginning with the introduction of some figure pass over into a disquisition or monologue in which the author voices, through Jesus, his own or rather the Church’s consciousness, usually upon some aspect of the Christology which is the dominant theme of the whole book. The original figure is forgotten, . . . and presently the so-called conversation drifts over into a doctrinal meditation upon some aspect of Christ’s person.”
One marvels, first of all, at the phrase “so-called conversation”. Where is any of the given instances called “conversation”? Certainly not by John, who thought of them in a very different way. Who calls them conversation? Solely and simply the modern writer, who has never apprehended the manner, or imagined to himself the purpose and intention, that rule the Fourth Gospel. To him what he calls a “conversation” must be and remain a conversation.
Take just one of all these examples — in chapter 4 (John 4) of this Gospel the disciples, when they came back to the well, found Jesus, “and they marvelled that He was talking with a woman: yet no man said ‘What seekest thou?’ or ‘Why speakest thou with her?’” The verbs that are used
We see, then, that John does not use the term “conversation,” or anything corresponding to it: he was interested in these “so-called conversations” on account of the doctrinal meditation into which they pass. They begin as personal scenes, often marvellously individualised; and they gradually or instantaneously pass into an exposition. But. why not? Why should the author be debarred from following out his own bent? He has produced the greatest book in all literature by doing so; but the modern scholar cannot see the greatness and forbids the method. In the second place, why is this method peculiar to and characteristic of the second century? Why was it impossible in the first century? The assumption is that it is a “feature of a later age”: no evidence is offered for the assumption; there is none. The modern writer starts with the fixed idea that the book is late, and anything and everything in the book becomes to him forthwith a proof of lateness. He never asks why the detail is late, or what marks it as of the second century. He simply assumes. In the third place, there is stated in a footnote one single analogy to the method which we find in John; and this analogy is taken from one of the few parts of the New Testament which admittedly has been composed in the first century, and at the very beginning of Christian literature, viz., the Epistle to the Galatians 2:15 f. This analogy stands in a footnote, perhaps it is an afterthought; but how can a critic, by a quotation from a first century book, prove his assumption that this method of John’s could only be originated in the second century? Because John uses the method, it is late; and his Gospel is late because it uses the method. The argument then proceeds that “this method [in the Fourth Gospel] precludes the idea that the author could have been an eye-witness of these scenes, or that he is reproducing such debates from memory”. Why so? What proof is given of this? None, except some German opinion and the passage from the Epistle to the Galatians. Now, that passage is autobiographical: Paul relates his own debate with Peter, and gradually “drifts over into a doctrinal disquisition,” while “the original figure is forgotten,” and we hear no more about Peter and have no “record of his final attitude or the effect which he produced”.
It would not be easy to produce a more perfect parallel. The critic knows it, and quotes it, and argues that, inasmuch as this method was used by Paul in the first century, therefore it could not be used by John, but that its occurrence in a work bearing John’s name proves that the work was written in a later age. Is this historical reasoning, or literary criticism, or sheer prepossession with a fixed idea that anything and everything observed in the Fourth Gospel is) and must be, a proof of lateness and “pseudonymous origin”? In the fourth place, with regard to this method, which has been unhesitatingly taken as indicating second century origin without any proof that it is usual in the second century — simply assuming that such a way of writing belongs to the second century, of which we know extremely little — I would venture to maintain that the method is peculiarly characteristic of the first century. It belongs to the period when the facts were still close at hand, and not afar off: it belongs to the period when the lesson and the moral and the principle were still felt to be the most important — not that I believe the facts ever were regarded as in themselves unimportant, but they were at first more familiar and were assumed as familiar.
Finally, this method is very characteristic of Paul, who slips so unconsciously from narrative of events to his own inferences from them, that it is hard to tell where narrative ends and hortatory inference takes its place. So it is in the passage quoted, as above, from Galatians 2:13 ff. So again it is in the passage 1 Corinthians 11:25-34, where I defy any one to detect at what point the narrative passes from a direct simple recital of the words of Jesus, first into what may be a drawing out of the truth involved in the words, then into what must be such an exposition, and finally into a pure hortatory lesson deduced by Paul from what he began as a narrative. There is in the passage no desire and no intention to paint a picture or describe a scene. There is only the intense and overmastering passion to bring out the bearing of the acts and words on the present situation. To put the case in a word, the method of John in this respect is the method of Paul. If one belongs to the first century, there is no reason why the other also should not belong to the same century. We touch only this small point of method, and in Section XLVIII mention a certain similarity of spirit in the two apostles. The Samaritan woman was known to Luke (and probably to Paul), as we see in Acts 16:13 ff. Paul and his companions came to a new country, where the Gospel was strange. They came to a stream, and sat, and talked with the women, especially one, who was influential, possessed of capital to deal in expensive foreign cloth, head of a household, which did as she directed. Her influence “opened a door” for Paul. Jesus came to a new country, where His message was strange. He sat by a spring and talked to a woman. She was influential, and brought the men to see and hear one who was perhaps Christ. Like Jesus, Paul was entreated to stay. The analogy proves that the story was familiar in Christian circles in the first century. The small point which we have been considering is an example of method, and we find that even in method the same unstudied and unconscious way of allowing narrative gradually to change into reflection and lesson is common to both Paul and John,
It would lead far beyond the plan of this book to compare the two apostles, and to show how the same teaching is in each coloured by the individual character of the writer. Only on one point does it aid our purpose to dwell for a moment in the following section.